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Beginning with early issues, the emphasis was on opinion articles and an analysis of news events. Established as a weekly newsmagazine, it offered condensations of articles from American, Canadian and European publications. Type-only covers gave way to illustrated covers during the early 1900s. After Isaac Funk's death in 1912, Robert Joseph Cuddihy became the editor.[1] In the 1920s, the covers carried full-color reproductions of famous paintings. By 1927, The Literary Digest climbed to a circulation of over one million. Covers of the final issues displayed various photographic and photo-montage techniques. In 1938, it merged with the Review of Reviews, only to fail soon after. Its subscriber list was bought by Time.[1]

The Literary Digest is best-remembered today for the circumstances surrounding its demise.

As it had done since 1916, it conducted a straw poll regarding the likely outcome of the 1936 presidential election. Before 1936, the poll had always correctly predicted the winner.

The 1936 poll showed that the Republican candidate, GovernorAlfred Landon of Kansas, was likely to be the overwhelming winner.[4] This seemed plausible as the Republicans had fared well in Maine, and at this time, the state's congressional and gubernatorial elections were then held in September, as opposed to the rest of the nation where these elections were held in November, along with the presidential election (as they are today). A Landon victory also seemed likely in light of the conventional wisdom at that time, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation", a saying coined because Maine was regarded as a "bellwether" state which usually supported the winning candidate's party.

In November, Landon only won Vermont and Maine, while PresidentFranklin Delano Roosevelt won the 46 other states. Landon's electoral vote total of eight is equal record low for a major-party nominee since the American political paradigm of the Democratic and Republican parties began in the 1850s. The Democrats joked, "As goes Maine, so goes Vermont," and the magazine was so discredited by this failure that it folded within two years.

In retrospect, the polling techniques employed by the magazine were to blame. Although it had polled ten million individuals (of whom about 2.4 million responded, an astronomical total for any opinion poll),[5] it had surveyed its own readers first, a group with disposable incomes well above the national average of the time (shown in part by their ability to afford a magazine subscription during the depths of the Great Depression), and two other readily available lists: that of registered automobile owners and that of telephone users, both of which were also wealthier than the average American at the time. Research published in 1972 and 1988 concluded that non-response bias was the primary source of this error, although their sampling frame was also quite different from the vast majority of voters.

George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion achieved national recognition by correctly predicting the result of the 1936 election, and also correctly predicted the quite different results of the Literary Digest poll to within about 1% using a smaller sample size of 50,000.[5] Gallup's last poll before the election predicted Roosevelt would receive 56% of the popular vote; the official tally gave Roosevelt 61%.

This debacle led to a considerable refinement of public opinion polling techniques and later came to be regarded as ushering in the era of modern scientific public opinion research.